![User banner](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ef036ee9-0abd-4bb6-9d12-966c56947a07.jpeg)
Ye gods, I finished this video and now I'm going grey.
Worth it though.
I'm likely starting a game next month, so if you have any ideas, shoot them over. There's an issue boards on Gitlab.
You can definitely port Requiem ideas with the files, though if you want 100% actual Requiem, you're better off remaking it from scratch (took me 3 months though, so it's not done lightly). And I've kept a branch called 'original' which has the original, unmodified books, or as close as I could make in case anyone wants to start from there (go to source files, click 'branch', then click 'original').
After you mentioned Malkavians, I started thinking about better derangement rules. I've just pushed a new copy up 5 minutes ago (same link, but the Derangement rules have been changed).
I think it'd work, though I added a little more in terms of stakes. Mostly, the stakes are backgrounds, so characters can steal or destroy others' backgrounds.
Also, it annoyed me that the backgrounds don't have a mechanic, so they're gained and lost by Storyteller fiat.
There's a short overview as a primer.
If that sounds like what you're after, I've recreated the original books, and modified them, so I don't have to reference a Google doc for house rules:
I feel like the Malkavians need mechanical solutions for these problems.
On derangements: something like 'you go mad when it's a full moon' is vague. I feel like it'd be easier with a just any system, for example 'renew all Willpower during a full moon, but lose one each scene thereafter', which encourages the player to try just about anything during that night.
Twisting the mechanics also means the player doesn't lose agency by thinking 'oh well, time to act crazy I guess'.
On the combat problem: I feel like this is a symptom of a larger problem with the system. Combat has a system - it has levers everywhere which do things. Nothing else does, and you can't push buttons which aren't there.
I've solved the second problem by replacing Combat rules with general 'Contest' rules -- a single system for Extended and Resisted actions, which works for Investigations, competing companies, or snide remarks at Elysium...and sword fights, if you must.
The internet's fine - the web's the problem.
ssh, Call of Duty, email, random voice-call software on strange ports - all of them work fine. People have problems with websites.
Plenty of websites of course are fine, the problems present when people use search engines and find a bunch of guff written by a bot, Paywalls, and sign-up screens.
They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so if you want to help there, 'make good art', write and share good content, don't feed the machine. Sounds like you're doing that already if you're on Lemmy.
And if you want to check out a quieter corner of the internet, where things aren't all in-your-face-sing-up-click-here-now-NOW-DOIT...download the lagrange browser and check out Gemini. It's a mostly plain-text protocol, where people read and write, and sometimes share whacky music.
Yea, 'bottom-up' is a great way to put it.
Like, I can still add a totally different gnoll tribe later on in a module, or just add one 'from the icy South', and let the GM imply a world without yammering about it.
The thing is, this is still tying culture to race.
I had a go at breaking past this barrier, and found it extremely difficult. I started with the idea that geography informs culture, and made a split between elves in the frozen South and elves tropical jungles. This left me with half the normal space to write about elven cultures.
So I figured I could do 2-3 cultures per race, and end up with (5 x 2.5) ~13 descriptions of fantasy cultures. But who wants that? I can't use that much in my own game. Writing because you have to write something makes for bad writing.
Another route is to limit cultures even more. Maybe dwarves and gnomes basically live the same way, as do gnolls and humans. But then it seems odd that gnolls having the mouth of a canine changes nothing about them. If nothing else, their language has to be deeply different, given the lack of lips.
So in the end, I've decided to just fill in a very small part of the world, and leave an underlying assumption that elves, humans, and gnolls might do things differently elsewhere.
Goblin culture doesn’t have a concept of “Property”. A stick on the ground and a tool in a locked shed are equally up for grabs if a thing needs doing. They casually take and leave things all over their communities, eat from communal pots, and genuinely Do Not Understand why the Core Races are so Angry and prone to Violence all the time.
This is nice. It reminds me of the Piraha notion of ownership. If they swing by someone's place to use their boat, but the person isn't there, they'll just use the boat anyway. Once they return with a catch, the boat-owner gets the first pick (e.g. the biggest fish), because it's 'their boat'. So they still have property rights, but they overcome the potential waste of someone not using a boat.
I have cultures'/ races write-ups in BIND.
Here's some snippets:
Roleplaying Dwarves
Check then double-check.
- Does this person really know where the lost temple lies? Ask him about the rooves, doors, and other items made of wood. If the temple was lost three centuries ago, those constructions must have degraded. Does his story match?
- Does the beer taste good? A really good beer still tastes good when you drink three in a row.
Roleplaying Elves
The various elven languages have no words for good',
bad', or `evil'.
As a result, elves to not fully understand or use these words, even when speaking other languages.
Bread cannot go bad' -- it has mould. They will never call a song
good' -- the song feels lively, or sounds like a Sunrise, or makes one think of home.
They would never call someone evil' -- they might say
destructive' or useless', or
selfish', but never use language which characterizes anything with such a wide notion as good' or
bad'.
If someone says your plan sounds good', make sure to clarify if they mean that they want the results of the plan, or if the plan seems likely to succeed, or if the plan has been stated clearly. And when you hear something is
bad', clarify that too.
Roleplaying Gnomes
Think sideways.
Can we apologize to the mage and make amends instead of killing her? Can you use a hammer to communicate? What else do shoes do?
Gnomes see the world from a different perspective. They look up people's noses all day. Gnomes see the ceiling while others look down at the ground.
Gnomes travel slowly but it looks like a large space to them. From a relative perspective, a travelling Gnome has travelled farther than the rest of the troupe. Are we counting footsteps or miles? Did you know that every mile has 5.280 feet?
Where did the mage commission her traps? Is the architect still alive? Does he have standard schematics for his traps in a workshop where he builds traps for people?
What kind of contract do you make when you sell someone a trap to guard a dungeon? What happens if I roll a boulder down the stairs? Have these traps killed before? Where do the bodies go? Does someone climb down to get them out and do they use a ladder? If we dig out the stream nearby, we could flood the dungeon.
The latest version is a wip, available here (Chapter 4).
I continuously hear from ex-Twitter people that they had some thousands of followers, but that engagement on Mastodon is much higher on a per-follower basis.
Maybe Twitter just had more bots? Like, a lot more.
It's not like anyone's checked those 40,000 accounts.
Random thoughts in no particular order:
- The writing seems clear after a skim.
- The formatting is ugly as all hell. If you want a plain document with nice formatting, can I recommend LaTeX?
- Given that indie projects are only read by people who read indie RPG projects, maybe the 'what is an RPG' section could swap out for 'very fast rules summary'. But I guess the "Philosophy" section covers that.
- With all the emphasis on time tracking, maybe provide a character sheet which lets you pin-point things which will happen at a particular time? Like coins for 10-minute tracker, and pencilled-in events for the months-long actions?
- I don't understand this magic system.
I tried to understand how merging several columns into one would work
It's this button.
Also there are no in cell checkboxes in Calc,
Checkboxes:
https://ask.libreoffice.org/uploads/short-url/biHcqD9rpmk0V92ShVFWZwDVIUD.ods
Something new with Calc? Not to my knowledge, though I've never found something I couldn't do. What additional features do Google Docs have?
For online-usage, nothing will ever beat spreadsheets. They exist to crunch numbers and compare values. They work with both text and numbers. And they're flexible.
- Want to add +2 to perception for elves? Check if
race = "Elf"
and if so, add +2. - Want to add a fixed list of weapons for the player to choose from? Stick the entire list on a secret sheet, then reference them in a drop-down menu.
If a bespoke tool ever came out, it would only do one system, badly. Spreadsheets do any system, and the skills you learn with them are transferrable to almost all other spreadsheet programmes.
There's my indie RPG character spreadsheet (requires Libreoffice Calc). Fill in your name, and it'll use numerological constants to find your race and stats, then tracks your XP every time you buy a skill.
People want to use something like a pdf because it looks like paper, but this instinct is wrong. PDFs are for printing. Their fill-in text boxes are ugly, and programming them is clunky.
It's a great book.
Oh - and also they have zero 'phatic' communication. Everything means something. So you can't say 'good night', unless you are saying 'this night is good for dancing'...or for something else. It's precise, representative statements, or gtfo. Instead, they remind people 'Don't Sleep, [because] there are snakes'.
It reminds me of Bilbo's 'Good morning!', with Gandalf.
I'm over on ttrpgs.com. It's a general RPG design log, plus a boat-load on BIND, my open source RPG.
The apps are certainly in need of all the help they can get. I have Lemur and Jerboa, and they're both janky as all heck.
Fantastic suggestions, cheers for the write-up.
General principles are good - with the right design the entire thing should reduce to a flowchart and some tables.
...and then we have magical items and areas, so plenty to conceptual work to do. It's turned into a mammoth discussion on the board.
Probably Don't Sleep, There are Snakes. It's the story of a Christian missionary who goes to convert the Piraha people. Unfortunately, their language stamps empiricism into the verb, so every single sentence has to come with how you learnt the information.
- Learning by experience ("I saw a jaguar")
- Learning by deduction ("There's jaguar poops, and tracks, so a jaguar was here")
- Learning by another's experience ("Someone said she saw a jaguar")
Gossip is grammatically impossible.
So he starts translating the Bible, but they keep trying to clarify what he means.
What colour was Jesus? Black or white?
But he never met Jesus.
Okay, so when your dad met Jesus.....
But his dad never met Jesus, so the translation cannot work.
The book goes over how they craft, their attitudes towards sleep (it's a vice - just don't), the way they think about time.
Eventually, Dan left an atheist. In the end, they converted the missionary through grammar.
My game has fewer rules than Pathfinder by any measure, although 'a page or two' seems a very low number - that sounds more like a little zine than a fully-fledged RPG.
I like this idea, but given that players never read the rules, it's a little like asking my granny what kind of package management system her computer should use.
Conserving the Earth
Earth’s natural resources include air, water, soil, minerals, plants, and animals. Conservation is the practice of caring for these resources so all living things can benefit from them now and in the future.
My capsule set up
I keep seeing gemini capsules without an RSS feed and whatnot, so I thought I'd share my standard setup. There's not much to it.
It's a python script which takes dates and tags from the markdown metadata, then uses that to order the RSS feed (future dates are simply not published) and uses the tags to create topics.gmi files, with a list of all the articles which have that tag.
The basic example is here:
> git clone ssh://soft.dmz.rs:2222/capsule.com
It requires fortune
, make
(optional), md2gemini
, and gematom
to run.
fortune
is in all the Linux repos, and md2gemini
can be installed with pip. Unfortunately, gematom
will need to be installed from the AUR or built from source (I have instructions in the doc, but I've not tested them very well).
But if getting gematom working goes smoothly, the rest is simple - just type make
.
Do your sessions feel like they have plot?
Give us a run-down of your last session in bullet-point format.
Does it seem to have plot, or to operate like real-world scenarios (kinda random, not crazy), or more like a fever-dream?